Noir sans frontiers: reflections on the transnational flaneur-as-detective

flaneur-as-detective
Abstract
As Walter Benjamin astutely observes in the Arcades Project and elsewhere, one of the
earliest incarnations of the flaneur is to be found in the figure of the urban detective as first
conceived in the writings of Edgar Allen Poe and Eugene Sue. In this paper I reflect upon this
identification and briefly consider the multiple incarnations of the flaneur and the
significance of transnational flanerie in the contemporary cultural and political context.
Taking the Danish-Swedish-German neo-noir television series The Bridge (Bron / Broen)
[2011, 2013, 2015] as an exemplary contemporary instance of the ‘transnational urban
detective,’ I consider three kinds of transationalism:
a) how noir itself constitutes a transitional genre, migrating across borders;
b) how media products / formats can be embedded, dis-embedded and re-embedded in
new and different transnational contexts as part of the global culture industry.
c) how noir detectives weave back and forth across and between cities in neighbouring
countries as part of their investigations.
I conclude with reflections on how the bridge itself – the very symbol of transnationalism –
forms a marginal and liminal site, a non place (Marc Augé’s non lieu) and threshold or in-
between space (Siegfried Kracauer’s Zwischenräume), and in so doing provides the
transitional flaneur-as-detective not so much with a home but a haunt, a locus of habitual
return and inescapable melancholy.
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I
2
In Einbahnstrasse under the title ‘Paperweight’ Walter Benjamin wryly suggests how
astonished, and indeed triumphant, the pharaohs of ancient Egypt would have been to
discover one of their hieroglyph-adorned columns, the Obelisk, standing tall amidst the
incessantly circulating traffic of present-day Paris, transplanted to be sure, but still very much
at the centre of things, in the heart of what was for him the nineteenth-century capital of
capital. 1 Then again, a culture so preoccupied with the afterlife of humans, animals and
artefacts may not have been so surprised: as the great pyramids and other elaborate burial
complexes attest, this was a civilization in which the most ambitious and ostentatious
architecture imaginable was oriented to the posthumous and to posterity. But the pharaohs’
monument is vainglorious: as Benjamin points out, the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde
receives scant attention today, and no-one bothers to decipher its pictorial script. It stands
irrelevant and illegible, an anachronism.
Architecture outlasts the builders; an object the artisan; an artwork the artist; and a text its
author. Benjamin was all too aware of this notion of the after-life [Nachleben] or after-history
[Nachgeschichte] of things and indeed made the study of its manifold forms and fragments
his own: the ruin, the obsolete, the outmoded, the unfashionable, the vestige, the trash, the
trace; the ghost. And he too, like the pharaoh, would probably be a little – but not a lot –
astonished to find that today, seventy-five years after his own tragic death, scholars around
the world continue to discuss one of his most inscrutable metaphorical / allegorical figures:
the flaneur, or more precisely the transnational flaneur (with contributions from scholars from
Korea, France and Britain, this very volume of Sociétés itself is testimony to the flaneur as
transnational phenomenon). Never a triumphalist, though, Benjamin would surely have
allowed himself a little smile: for we are very much paying attention, trying to read this
figure precisely because the flaneur remains so elusive and enigmatic. “It does not permit
itself to be read [Es lässt sich nicht lessen]” – Edgar Allen Poe’s final verdict on the
countenance of the ‘man of the crowd’ applies to both ancient Obelisk and the face of the
flaneur though their contemporary fates are very different; for the former, it ensures futility
and forlornness; for the latter, it is the very source of an enduring fascination. 2
1 W. Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol. 1: 1913-26, Harvard UP, Cambridge, MA, 1996, p.
462.
2 E. A. Poe, The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, Penguin Classics, London, 2006, p. 229.
3
My point is this: How curious it is that we continue to discuss the concept of the flaneur, a
figure who, for Benjamin drawing on Charles Baudelaire, relished sauntering on the Parisian
boulevards and through the arcades for only a few decades in the middle of the nineteenth
century before being elbowed off the pavement and swallowed up by the burgeoning
metropolitan crowd, and who enjoyed a brief albeit memorable return or reincarnation in
1920s Berlin in the reflections of his close friend and collaborator Franz Hessel! 3 We should
ask ourselves: why has this eccentric, short-lived figure – metropolitan, male, middle-class,
white, heterosexual, European, scopophilic, chauvinist, pretentious, politically myopic, a
snob, a dandy, an aesthete, a peacock, a fop, a fraud, an idler, an irrelevance, a tortoise-
walking absurdity, “call him what you will” Baudelaire observes, 4 invitingly – why has he so
captured our imagination? And, most significantly, how has this figure and its many guises
and disguises undergone processes of transformation, translation, transgendering,
transplantation and transnationalization such that, unlike the oversized Egyptian
‘paperweight’, it still somehow speaks to and resonates with us today? Why do we continue
to circle around, time and again, this puzzling figure from the past as if caught in its
centripetal pull? The flaneur is an anachronism, to be sure, but one that still happily haunts
us.
II
In the words of the song, “everything goes back to the beginning ..”
It is nearly a quarter of a century since I first published an article (indeed it was my first ever
publication!) on the theme of the flaneur as ‘heroic pedestrian, pedestrian hero’, and more
than twenty years since, in another essay, I attempted to trace the remarkable persistence and
continuing pertinence of this most curious figure – what I termed the ‘afterlife of an allegory’
– in a variety of new incarnations and as a metaphor or trope in contemporary cultural
thought. The flaneur, and flaneuse, I suggested, had become a point of reference for a whole
host of only loosely connected experiences and practices involving movement in urban
spaces and between cities, in cyberspace and between websites: tourism, window shopping,
3 See for example F. Hessel, Walking in Berlin. A Flaneur in the Capital, Scribe Editions,
Melbourne / London, 2016. 4 C. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, Da Capo Press, New York
NY, 1964/1986, p. 4.
truck driving, (citizen-)journalism, charity work, au pair work and babysitting, browsing,
hacking, computer gaming, parkour and free-running, skateboarding, internet surfing, channel
hopping, bar hopping, club-scene cruising, hitch-hiking, jogging, loitering, stalking. The
flaneur was now to be found strolling on two legs, pedalling on two wheels, driving on four
wheels, sitting on the sofa, glued to the screen, perched at the desk, at the counter, at the bar,
in the airport, on the lookout, on the hop. And why should the flaneur be confined to cities?:
is flanerie impossible in rural setting and landscapes?: what of rambling, hiking, hill-walking,
trekking, orienteering, BMXing, off-piste skiing and snowboarding? With all these aliases
and avatars, the flaneur seemed in danger of vanishing into a new crowd of possible identities
and countenances. Maybe we are all flaneurs / flaneuses now; flaneurs/se R us. Perhaps,
though that is hardly helpful. Perhaps we should go back briefly to the beginning, back to
Baudelaire and his seminal account of the ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863). Here, in a
key passage Baudelaire writes:
“The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his
profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate
spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the midst of the multitude, amid the ebb and
flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and
yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world to be at the centre of the world, and
yet to remain hidden from the world – such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those
independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The
spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. … Thus the lover of universal
life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. … He
is an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I’, at every instant rendering and explain it in
pictures more living than life itself, which is always unstable and fugitive”. 5
I suggest three points emerge from this.
Firstly, what is decisive about the flaneur is that the figure combines movement through
urban space with “passionate” spectatorship and visual representation: the flaneur is always
and everywhere a sightseer though not in the conventional sense. Motion and vision mean
that the setting is always both moved through and subject to observation and scrutiny:
flanerie takes in its surrounds en passant or en traversant. The flaneur is an attentive and
5 Ibid pp. 9-10.
5
acute eye on the go: what is seen, the urban environment, is transformed into an object of
critical scrutiny and aesthetic appreciation. The quotidian becomes remarkable, the everyday
extraordinary: the flaneur presages the film camera in its rediscovery of the Benjaminian
‘optical unconscious’. The city becomes a cityscape, a spectacle, a work of art.
Secondly, the flaneur is not just an embodiment of vision, but also an envisioning of a model
of and for the privileged pedestrian, a “prince” of the pavement. This “perfect flaneur” steps
out as a utopian figure in a number of ways:
a) at liberty to move freely, unperturbed and unmolested, through the public spaces of
the city thronged with crowds of strangers, without constraint, resistance or trepidation; the
flaneur assumes an uncontested right to be out and about on the town and an entitlement to
proper respect and due deference (such rights and claims have been anything but self-evident
for the flaneuese of course);
b) at leisure to watch others while remaining unobserved oneself, seemingly invisible
to others as they hurry about their business, the flaneur luxuriates in a vantage-point of power
and prestige. There is something of the perambulating panopticon about this invisible,
incognito spectator.
c) at home amid the agitated, anonymous crowd, the flaneur finds ease and comfort
among the unknown and unknowable multitude of strangers. The flaneur finds inviting and
welcoming precisely that which most citizens experience as disquieting, disorientating,
distasteful: the “non-I”. There is an openness to and embrace of otherness here in which
anxiety becomes excitement, the hostile hospitable, the unhomely [unheimlich] homely
[hiemlich] At home everywhere and anywhere, the flaneur may be an eccentric and enigmatic
figure, but s/he is not an uncanny one. Indeed, one might say, if such a word existed, the
flaneur is a figure of “de-uncannification” or “re-cannification” of the modern metropolis.
Indeed, the flaneur, as Baudelaire points out here, makes and remakes not just the city but
“the world”. In this sense, the flaneur has always been a cosmopolitan, a figure of the
transnational.
Why is the flaneur so enticing for us today?: perhaps in part at least because, in our terrified
terrorized times of securitization and militarization, of petty nationalism and populist
xenophobia, of the architecture of exclusion (walls, barriers and towers), and of subjection to
para-military policing, to cyber-surveillance, suspicion, and sanction, this is a ‘wish-image’
6
of emancipation and internationalism, a dream-figure of freedom: to move nonchalantly and
casually as, when and where one wishes; to saunter across boundaries and trespass
thresholds, to traverse borders and frontiers without let or hindrance, blithely disregarding,
disrespecting any and all such demarcations and designations; to see and yet remains unseen,
surreptitiously side-stepping surveillance, screening and scrutiny; to delight in encounters
with difference and otherness. Let us not forget that flanerie was – and must be – sans
frontiers.
Indeed, one might venture to say that the transnational flaneur has perhaps never been more
relevant: as a figure of the free movement of the person, of people, at a moment when the free
movement of goods and services takes a priority. And not just ‘priority’: I live in a country
where the elected politicians are trying to solve the riddle of allowing commodities to move
unmolested across international boundaries while at the same time preventing human beings
people from doing the same. They term this ‘having one’s cake and eating it’. As Benjamin
informs us, the “last incarnation” of the flaneur was as a circulating advertisement, as
“sandwich-man” 6 – but perhaps from our perspective today, this was itself a final, futile
gesture towards freedom, an intimation and anticipation that the commodity would not
merely be fetishized, but would be granted freedoms and privileges in exact proportion to
their loss by humans. To adopt the guise of a walking commodity was a ruse to enjoy the
rights now only artefacts are now permitted. Welcome to twenty-first century Britain: open
for business, closed to people!
Thirdly, as attentive observer of the milling metropolitan crowd, there are the rudiments here
of the particular incarnation of the flaneur that I wish to discuss here: this is, then, one of the
first, if not the first guise or disguise adopted by the flaneur: the figure of the detective. What
are these rudiments? I suggest here that there are six: a) detective as the acute and astute
observer of the city and it inhabitants who sees through the everyday to disclose what lies
below the surface. Detective as critical urban reader and interpreter who fundamentally
mistrusts the appearances of things, who shows us that the everyday world is not quite what
is seems, that is another layer of reality to be revealed and unfolded (this is the key to
6 W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Harvard UP, Cambridge, MA, 1999, p. 451.
7
detective and espionage fiction as Luc Boltanski 7 has recently argued); detective as
archaeologist of the city, as the collector, compositor and interpreter of fragments of
quotidian urban life; c) as a figure of digression and seduction, the detective is continually
circling the city in the hunt for clues and for the killer; this also involves mistakes and
misidentifications, misinterpretations (the detective stories is full of deliberate misdirection
on the part of the writer, so-called ‘red herrings’); d) detective as a brooder over the puzzle
s/he has brought together (this is the ‘crime board’ set up in the police station in which the
fragments are collected and set out in relation to one another (the detective is confronted by a
mystery which must be solved and s/he is reduced to a state of intense melancholy by picture
puzzle pieces that do not fit together, that do not cohere, by the illegible hieroglyph); e) the
detective is the one who shows through the construction of a montage of the crime itself on
the crime board (detective reconstructs and shows the truth of the past from the pieces s/he
has assembled); the detective finally turns into the narrator, the storyteller who is able to
recount events, able to render communicable that which began as in comprehensible, as
incommunicable, the detective is the model historian as storyteller for hat s/he reconstructs is
the storyboard of the story itself. The detective tells his / her own tale – hence, the common
device of the voice over – because s/he is the author; detective story is the tale of the process
by which the detective retrospectively comes to reconstruct / recreate the story from its
pieces. Detective fiction is always metafiction in that sense: the story of the recovery / the
(re)writing of a story.
The detective is the urban observer par excellence, the great reader of the cityscape who is
acutely attentive to the physiognomies of its inhabitants and the traces, the clues, they leave
behind.
Among the numerous correspondences Benjamin posits between these two figures in
Convolute M of the Arcades Project, one finds the following unequivocal identification:
“Preformed in the figure of the flaneur is that of the detective. The flaneur required a social
legitimation of his habitus. It suited him very well to see his indolence as a plausible front,
behind which, in reality, hides the riveted attention of an observer who will not let the
unsuspecting malefactor out of his sight.” 8 (1999: 442).
7 See L. Boltanski, Mysteries and Conspiracies. Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the
Making of Modern Society, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, 2014. 8 W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Harvard UP, Cambridge MA, 1999, p. 442.
8
All this returns us to ‘The Man of the Crowd’.
III
Baudelaire, and Benjamin in turn, recognizes Poe’s eerie tale from 1840 as one of the
defining literary incarnation of the flaneur, though exact identifications are subject to dispute:
is the daemonic ‘man of the crowd’ himself, prowling the nocturnal streets of early Victorian
London in perpetual search of asylum amid the last vestiges of the daytime urban crowd, a
vision of the flaneur or, more likely, is it his pursuant, the narrator who follows him from a
safe distance, lured ever onwards by a compelling fascination which remains ultimately
unsatisfied as dawn breaks and the spell is finally broken? The flaneur as hunter or as hunted,
as criminal-detective or innocent victim and stalker – however this duality is configured, this
curious story provides Benjamin with what he famously terms an “something like an X-ray of
a detective story,” 9 an outline in which its skeletal structure is clearly evident even as the
actual crime itself is missing.
The city at night, a sinister figure with an inscrutable countenance and an eccentric manner, a
futile chase that leads through the darkened streets from the most fashionable parts of town to
its most wretched slums, providing thereby a kind of street-level panorama of spatial
economies and inequalities, an uneasy ending without moral resolution or the comfort of
certitude – these tropes are the bare bones of a very particular kind of detective fiction, not
the genteel Miss Marple world of tea at the vicarage, country house murders and the butler
who dunnit, confessing dutifully when unmasked by the amateur sleuth on the final page, but
the hard-boiled variety that was to flourish in sleazy and sordid ‘means streets’ of New York,
San Francisco and Los Angeles, as penned by Dashiel Hamett, Raymond Chandler and Ross
MacDonald. Poe’s ‘Man of the Crowd’ is an x-ray not so much of the detective story per se,
but of the crime thriller as noir. And it is to this term and this genre of crime fiction that I
now turn.
Let us follow a trail, a trans-Atlantic one in fact, of our own: in the middle of the nineteenth
century, the American writer Poe sets his tale ‘The Man of the Crowd’ in London and his two
pioneering detective stories, featuring his amateur investigator, the ever insightful C. Auguste
9 W. Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol. 4: 1938-40, Harvard UP, Cambridge MA, 2003, p. 27.
9
Dupin, in Paris (the ‘Murders in Rue Morgue’ [1841], and the ‘Mystery of Marie Roget’
[1842-3] and ‘The Purloined Letter’ [1844-5] ); his work is read and celebrated by the
definitive Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire. In the middle of the twentieth century, following
liberation from Nazi occupation, Paris plays host to a tranche of new American films, thrillers
and crime stories (among them, The Maltese Falcon, Laura, Murder My Sweet, Double
Indemnity and The Woman in the Window) whose brooding mood, troubling atmosphere and
ambiguous ethical content finds its ultimate designation and nomenclature in French:
published in 1955, Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton provide an overview of this new
film genre and its reception…